Life is Hard

Well, we used to look up in the sky and wonder, at our place in the stars. I want to skip the flattery and the attaboys because, I do know this, the sooner that we become less impressed with our life, with our accomplishments, with our career, with whatever that prospect is in front of us, the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with that and these things the sooner we get a whole lot better at doing them. It's like we've forgotten who we are huh... explorers, pioneers, not caretakers.

Now, why do you pursue things that scare you? Why seek the role that's hard? The answer is because it cost me something. Because it costs, it comes with a price. It's not really a risk unless you lose the fight. I feel more alive in them. I have experience in the making of them. I'm nervous every day I come to work.

There are things you can get away with within this world, and there are things you can't. Life is not easy. It is not. Don't try to make it that way. Life's not fair, it never was, it isn't now, and it won't ever be. Do not fall into the trap "The Entitlement Trap" of feeling like you're a victim. You are not. Get over it and get on with it and yes most things are more rewarding when you break a sweat to get them. I feel like when I nail a day and I knock and I know I did, I feel like yes.

I have a measure at the end of the day like you set out to do something, you prepared for it, you had the intention and you did it. That gives me the gratification, that makes me feel, gives me significance, that gives me the confidence to be brave, have courage, and when you do, you get stronger, you get more aware, you get more respectful of yourself, and that which you fear.

I want to talk about our opponent this afternoon. They're bigger, faster, stronger, more experienced and on paper, they're just better and they know it too. I want to tell you something that they don't know about your heart. What causes heading out there is what I feel like I was born to do and it excites me. Just because you can? No. Come on it's not a good enough reason to do something even when it means having more, be discerning, choose IT because YOU want it. Do it because you want to. It's on you. It's on you.

We remember the stuff we earn, the stuff we experience, more than what the teacher tells us or what someone gives us for free, we just do, we broke a proverbial sweat on it, whether it's mental or physical or whatever, we built it. We understand. We felt how we got it, how we achieved it, how we got what we wanted. Those stick with us whether we forget them intellectually, they were written in our lineage and they build resilience and they build a healthy, true optimism going forward to know that oh no I've worked for something before and achieved it. Delayed Gratification. Oh, there are choices I can make today for myself that will pay me back later in life. I've got friends and trust me I've done it myself. You know that losing a job and then getting another but not taking it because it's less salary than maybe the one they had before, and all of a sudden find themselves, three, four, five, six, seven, eight years a decade later going, they're still stuck. They didn't do anything, they're still saying like NO, I'm gonna find that thing and I'm going. You missed a decade, man.

Just go, do that one that you love to do, that maybe was gonna pay you less because you'd at least been building something through the day and who knows what that would have led to. Maybe that would have led to something where you're getting paid five times more than you were doing, something else you love. Even more! So sometimes it's not even about what choice we make. Just make a choice and commit to it and go and dive in.

So while we're here and they're going to run across the jumbotron, let's make it a place, where we break a sweat, where we believe, where we enjoy the process of succeeding in the places, and ways that we are fashioned too, where we don't have to look over our shoulder because we're too busy doing what we're good at, voluntarily keeping our own council because we want to. Traveling towards immortal finish lines, we write our own book, overcoming our fears. We make friends with ourselves and that is the place that I'm talking about. From the soles of your feet, with every ounce of blood you've got in your body, lay it on the line until the final whistle blows, and if you do that, we cannot lose.

So turn the page, get off the ride, you are the author of the book of your life. Knowing who we are is hard. It's hard. Give yourself a break, eliminate who you are not, first, and you're going to find yourself where you need to be.

A very important person in my life comes to me and says, "Who's your hero?". I said, "I don't know. I got to think about that, give me a couple of weeks". I came back two weeks later. This person comes up and says, "Who's your hero?". I said, "I thought about it. Do you know who it is?". I said, "it's me in 10 years". So, I turned 25, ten years later that same person comes to me and goes, "so are you a hero?" and I was like not even close. She said, "why?" and I said, "because my hero is me at 35". So you see every day, every week, every month, and every year of my life, my hero is always 10 years away. I'm never going to be my hero. I'm not going to obtain that. I know. I'm not and that's just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing. So, to any of us, whatever those things are, whatever it is we look up to, whatever it is we look forward to, and whoever it is we're chasing to, I say, "all right, all right, all right". I say just keep living.

Nobody has ever choked? I have, you know what I'm talking about, fumbling at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth once you got to the microphone, had a brain freeze on the exam that you were totally prepared for, forgot the punch line to a joke in front of 4000 graduating students at the University of Houston commencement. Or maybe you've had that feeling of, oh my god life just cannot get any better than this moment and ask yourself do I deserve this? Now, what happens when we get that feeling? Tense up. We have this sort of out-of-body experience where we are literally seeing ourselves in the third person and we realized that the moment just got bigger than us. You ever felt that way? I have, and it's because we have created a fictitious ceiling, a roof to our expectations of ourselves, a limit where we think it's all too good to be true. But it's not. And it's not our right to say or believe it is. We shouldn't create these restrictions on ourselves, a blue ribbon, a statue, a score, a great idea, the love of our life, a euphoric bliss. Who are we to think that we don't deserve or haven't earned these gifts when we get them? It's not our right. But if we stay in process within ourselves in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren't thinking of the finish line, because we're not looking at the clock, we're not watching ourselves on the jumbotron performing the very act that we're in the middle of. No, we're in the process. The approach is the destination and we're never finished.

The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world, they don't aim at the target. They aim at the other side of the target. We do our best when our destinations are beyond the measurement, when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, and when we have immortal finish lines. And when we do this, the race is never over. The journey has no port. The adventure never ends because we are always on the way. So do this. Do this and let somebody else come up and tap you on the shoulder and say, "Hey, you scored", let them run up and tap you on the show and say, "man, you won". Let them come tell you, you can go home now. Let them say, "I love you too!". Let them say, "thank you". Take the lid off the man-made roofs that we put above ourselves and always play like an underdog.

There we go.